Locked or open? Which save to pick for your redacted file
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After you redact, Conseal asks one final question: lock the restorable copy with a passphrase, or leave it open. It looks like a small choice, but it's the security decision of the whole flow. As the app puts it: the redacted file itself is readable by anyone you send it to. What differs is who can bring the hidden text back.
Locked: only your passphrase brings it back
Turn on Lock with passphrase and Conseal generates a six-word passphrase, like tennis-sugar-portal-able-turf-angel. From that moment those words are the only key to the hidden text.
Two things follow:
Write the passphrase down somewhere safe
Conseal never sees it and cannot reset it. That's the point: a passphrase we could recover, someone else could too. But losing the words means losing the ability to restore, permanently.
Share it separately, if at all
If a colleague needs to restore the file, send the passphrase through a different channel. A bundle and its passphrase in the same email is a locked door with the key taped to it.
Open: anyone with the file can restore it
Leave Lock with passphrase off and the bundle needs no passphrase: whoever has the file can bring every hidden value back in a few clicks.
Alarming outside your own machine, but it has a real job: files that never leave your workflow. Redacting for your own records or running the Safe AI Workflow on your own computer The Safe AI Workflow, a passphrase protects you from nobody and becomes a step you type all day.
Before you pick: verify
On the same panel, Verify redaction re-checks the output and confirms with a green Verified clean message that your selected items are gone. Run it before saving; it complements your own read-through rather than replacing it.
The rule
Is the file leaving your hands, ever, for any reason? Locked. No exceptions
Staying on your machine, inside your own workflow? Open is fine
Unsure? Pick locked. Over-caution costs you six typed words. Under-caution means someone you emailed a "redacted" file has just un-redacted it.
- Introducing Conseal
- How to safely use ChatGPT with confidential documents
- That black box isn't redaction: 4 mistakes that expose sensitive data
- Locked or open? Which save to pick for your redacted file